VMware vSphere 5 - Part 2: High Availability and Fault Tolerance

VMware vSphere 5 – Part 2: High Availability and Fault Tolerance

Systems engineers, system administrators, vSphere operators and support personnel working in virtualized server environments who have completed Datacenter Virtualization with vSphere 5: Part 1. Candidates who are seeking to learn about advanced features and configuration options available in the vSphere Enterprise product. This includes, configuring High Availability, Distributed Resource Scheduling, upgrading to vSphere 5 and auto deployment. A solid technical foundation in virtualization using vSphere coupled with strong network and administration skills are required as a prerequisite for this path.

Description
High Availability (HA) is a popular feature within vSphere. In many cases, the lack of High Availability is the key argument used against virtualization. Many IT professionals believe that in a virtualized environment, the failure of a physical server will affect all the applications and workloads running on that server at the same time. VMware addresses this concern with a feature present in ESXi clusters: vSphere HA. In the event of complete server failure, vSphere HA provides an automated process for restarting the VMs that were running on an ESXi host at a time of the failure.

Fault Tolerance (FT) is the evolution of continuous availability that works by utilizing VMware vLockstep technology to keep a primary machine and a secondary machine in a virtual lockstep. This virtual lockstep is based on the record/playback technology that VMware introduced in VMware Workstation in 2006. The vSphere FT process matches instruction for instruction and memory for memory to get identical results. This course discusses VMware Virtual Infrastructure High Availability options built in and available out of the box: vSphere HA and vSphere FT. These options help you provide better uptime for your critical applications.This course can be used in preparation for the VCP5 exam. However, it is not sponsored or authorized by VMware so does not fully satisfy the training requirements to achieve the certification.

Objective

vSphere High Availability

identify key drivers of vSphere HA

recognize types of HA failure and failover scenarios

identify the purpose of HA admission control

determine appropriate admission control policy options, given a scenario